18
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 11 & 18, 2014
Making a Meal of It
Dinner with cinema's preëminent Surrealist.
marble mansion,
the men handsome and sturdy in evening dress
and top hats, the women in jewels, furs, and
gowns. They're the élite of Mexican culture
and business, and their hosts are putting on a
banquet for them. Sitting down at the long table,
they exchange the usual fatuous compliments,
but in this case there's an underlying sense of
menace. They don't much like one another,
yet when the meal is finished they cannot
leave. They just can't do it. Weeks pass, and
the politeness dissolves. Conspiracies develop;
lovers commit suicide in a closet; paranoia and
mob rule take over. Elsewhere in the mansion, a
growling bear and several fleecy sheep linger.
So it goes in Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating
Angel"(1962), in which almost nothing is
explained. It's at BAM on Aug. 14, as part of a
monthlong revival of his work. Buñuel was the
preëminent Surrealist of the cinema, a director
viciously alive, stacking up his
ciphers in search of profundity
is a mistake.
"Angel" is only the first of his
dinner-party films; the second,
"The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie"(Aug. 9), made
in 1972, is even more ba ing
and funny. Another slice of
the upper crust, including
three respectable husbands
running a drug ring, gathers in
a large house outside Paris. In
the first film, the diners can't
leave; this time, they can't eat.
They meet in di erent places,
including restaurants, and then
return to the house, but their
hunger is never satisfied. A
chicken arrives, which turns
out to be a rubber chicken;
a tea room is out of tea; the
Army, on maneuvers, breaks
into the country house and
stays for a while; some dolorous
stranger shows up and relates a
dream, which we see. Soon the
diners are dreaming, too, and
Buñuel wraps dream within
dream, taunting his characters
with mocking nightmares
that undermine their peace
and authority. In "Angel," the
upper classes paid attention
to certain forms of honor, but
in "Charm" the wealthy don't
disguise their nastiness. Why
bother? Precursors to today's
superrich, they can get away
with anything. Buñuel is playful
and knife sharp at the same
time. Eating is the central ritual
of haut-bourgeois civilization,
and he aims for the gut.
---David Denby
A banquet is overtaken by paranoia and mob rule in Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962), at BAM.
VIES
who revelled in erotic provocation, puzzles,
formal play, and "symbols" that he planted like
savage jokes. Born in Spain in 1900, he joined the
Paris avant-garde around 1925 and collaborated
with Salvador Dali, with whom he completed
the sixteen-minute-long film "Un Chien
Andalou," in 1929. The image in "Chien" of a
woman's eye being cut with a razor remains one
of cinema's most upsetting, beautiful moments.
The shock that Buñuel administered to narrative
logic was just as great. His images, with a few
exceptions, didn't conform to a conventional, or
an unconventional, temporal scheme; instead,
the logic was associational. Meanings had
to be inferred (psychoanalysis helped). Yet
"interpreting" Buñuel too much mu es him. He
was an anarchist filmmaker-poet and moralist
who thought the rich corrupt, the Church
hypocritical and life-denying, and benevolence
largely meaningless. When the surface is so
EVERETT